If this supposition were to be argued from a lecture platform it is not unlikely that someone would shout out, ‘Well what about the bodies in the Royal Graves at Ur? No one could say them Sumerians were like us!’
Around 2600 BC, several top-notch individuals at Ur went to their eternal rest accompanied not only by all the precious property they could want, but also by their faithful retainers. There were three or four such graves, of which the Great Death Pit, with about seventy-two neatly laid out bodies, was the most spectacular. The concept that dead royalty must be accompanied to their graves by their former retainers is shocking and essentially deeply primitive. In Egypt the Egyptians did flirt with this idea in predynastic times, but soon came up with ushabti figures instead, boxes of small faience workmen who would accompany the dead and do their work when needed. Explanatory theories about the Ur finds fizzed madly; were they all drugged? Prisoners of war? Already dead? Alongside such questions comes the broader issue, for burying crowds of young and beautiful court personnel on the assumption that they would be needed in the next world is certainly hard to digest. Sensibly, the practice disappears completely with the end of the dynasty; once rejected it was never to be reintroduced. That development is not at all hard to understand, but how retainer-sacrifice ever came to take hold within Ur society in the first place is. There are only two explanations: either it was an age-old practice for which there just happens to be no other real evidence from the ancient Middle East, or the idea finds it origin in circumstances surrounding a specific historic personage. In Mesopotamia the only real candidate for such a figure is Gilgamesh.
Gilgamesh, we can be sure, was a real man. He was an early king of Uruk who founded a short-lived dynasty at the beginning of the historical period. All the surviving literary traditions about Gilgamesh point to a figure of power and charisma that long-outlasted his own lifetime. The cycle of stories that came to circulate about his name testify to this, and give the impression that he was a man out of the same box as Alexander the Great, the impact of whose death led to narratives far beyond the sober scope of the historians who first tackled his life and times. In view of this, it seems a credible idea that the death of Gilgamesh himself could have seen the instigation of such a rite, where loyal retainers, à la Laertes, leapt into the grave, unable to face the future. A Sumerian literary text that describes the death of Gilgamesh has often been compared with the death scene as reconstructed at Ur. I would like to suggest that this primitive custom literally originated with the death of Gilgamesh, and was part of Uruk tradition long after. Perhaps a dynastic marriage between Uruk and Ur saw the custom imported to Ur, where it held sway for a while, and was then rejected for ever. This was not the typical Sumerian view in practice. But a restorative dip into Sumerian proverb and wisdom literature is very reassuring, as the real, everyday voices come out of the darkness: philosophical, puzzled, ironic, resigned, or sniggering. I see no reason at all to exclude the Sumerians from our brotherhood circle.
Babylon of the later time of Nebuchadnezzar, that of the Babylonian Exile, is certainly a familiar world. We have the huge public buildings: sky-scraper temples and far-famed palaces; we can gape at the wondrous walls and gates and marvel at the blue, swimming-pool tiles that lined the Ishtar Gate and Processional Way. We know most, however, from their magical writing that speaks of the many corners of life that buzzed and fretted there: rich bankers and speculators waxing fat, doctors and diviners with their cosmic operations, stall-keepers in the sūq selling fish and vegetables, myopic seal carvers and mutilated metalsmiths, and a bustling frenzy of peoples from around the Empire, their assorted gabbled languages lending reality to the image of Babel. We meet mercenaries, fortune-tellers, priests and prostitutes; cut-throats, mendicants, money-lenders and water-sellers. The great vanished metropolis with its noises and smells, garden luxury at one end and slum shacks at the other, must have been timeless in its daily life and thereby, thanks to its ancient words, almost within our grasp.
And those ancient people, writing their tablets, looking at their world, crawling between heaven and earth … like us.
4
Recounting the Flood
Thou too, sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The story of a flood that destroyed the world in which human and animal life was saved from extinction by a hero with a boat is almost universal in the world’s treasury of traditional literature. The (global) flood story, whose central preoccupation is the frailty of the human condition and the uncertainty of divine plans, would certainly feature as a thought-provoking entry in any Martian Encyclopaedia of the Human World. Its rich theme has inspired many thinkers, writers and painters, the topic moving far beyond the borders of scripture and the sacred to become an inspiration for modern opera and film, in addition to literature.
Many scholars have tried to collect all the specimens in a butterfly net, to pin them out and docket them for family, genus and species. Flood Stories in the broadest sense (which are sometimes booked under Catastrophe Stories, for not all possible disasters are floods) have been documented in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Syria, Europe, India, East Asia, New Guinea, Central America, North America, Melanesia, Micronesia, Australia and South America. The scholars who have contributed most to this endeavour have produced varying totals, somewhere around three hundred all told, and a range of publications will enable the devotee to sample them in abundance. Some of these narratives reduce everything to a couple of sentences, others blossom into powerful and dramatic literature, and looking them over reinforces the impression that any culture that cannot muster some form of flood story is in the minority.
The collection and comparison of traditions is always fascinating, and creating and pruning a family tree of flood narratives is probably as enticing as any other such project. It is the breadth and overall variety, however, that is more significant than any fundamental similarity. After all, the forces of nature, including rivers, rain and sea (alongside earthquakes, whirlwinds, fire and volcanoes), are irresistible by man when they are roused and are likely to underpin much traditional narrative, while in any flood, however disastrous, certain individuals always survive, usually those with boats. There is no need to strive for a complex web of origin, dissemination and interrelations on the broadest scale. One must always reckon, too, with the ‘natural’ flow of uncontaminated narrative being interrupted or influenced in a specific way at a specific moment, such as through Bible teaching by missionaries.
The central example from the collector’s standpoint represents a unique case, however, where influence and dissemination are undeniable and have been of the greatest global significance. The story of Noah, iconic in the Book of Genesis, and as a consequence, a central motif in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, invites the comparative mythologer’s greatest attention. In all three scriptures the Flood comes as punishment for wrongdoing by man, part of a ‘give-up-on-this-lot-and-start-over’ resolution governing divine relations with the human world. There is a direct and undoubted Flood continuum from the Hebrew Old Testament to the Greek New Testament on the one hand and the Arabic Koran on the other. Since the Victorian-period discoveries of George Smith it has been understood that the Hebrew account derives, in its turn, from that in Babylonian cuneiform, much older, substantially longer, and surely the original that launched the story on its timeless journey. This book focuses on the first stage of this process, looking at the various Mesopotamian stories that survive on cuneiform tablets, and investigating how it came about that the story came into our own world so effectively.
Such an approach entitles the researcher to avoid entirely the question as to whether there ever ‘really was a Flood’. People have, however, long been concerned with that very question, and been on the lookout for evid
ence to support the story, and I imagine all good Mesopotamian archaeologists have kept the Flood at the back of their mind, just in case. In the years 1928 and 1929 important discoveries were made on sites in Iraq that were taken to be evidence of the biblical Flood itself. At Ur, for example, deep excavation beneath the Royal Cemetery disclosed more than ten feet of empty mud, below which earlier settlement material came to light. A similar, nearly contemporaneous, discovery was made by Langdon and Watelin at the site of Kish in southern Iraq. To both teams it seemed inescapable that here was evidence of more than ancient flooding, but of the biblical Flood itself, and Sir Leonard Woolley’s fluent lectures round about the country, backed up by his versatile pen, certainly came to promote the idea that at Ur they had found proof that Noah’s Flood had really taken place.
Similar deposits were identified at other archaeological sites, but in due course doubts were raised whether all such empty layers were really archaeologically contemporary, or indeed whether they were all water-deposited. In recent times this sort of would-be tangible evidence has fallen out of consideration. Certainly strata of empty mud confirm that human habitation in ancient Iraq was subject to disastrous and destructive flooding, and in general background terms such discoveries do much to enhance our appreciation of the extent to which ancient Mesopotamia was, in fact, vulnerable in this way, but few today would claim such discoveries concern the Flood described in the Book of Genesis. Sir Leonard, apparently, could hardly be surpassed as a persuasive speaker once he got going on the subject of Ur; Lambert told me in a rare confessional moment that it was as a schoolboy on the edge of his seat in a Birmingham cinema, listening to Woolley lecturing about discoveries, that he determined on his own life’s work as an Assyriologist.
In recent times the hunt for archaeological flood-levels for their own sake has rather fallen out of fashion, while further such discoveries depend on evidence that can only come from very deep and extensive excavations which are hardly practical today. In more recent times scholars have turned to geological rather than archaeological investigation, pursuing data about earthquakes, tidal waves or melting glaciers in the hunt for the Flood at a dizzying pace, but it is far beyond the scope of this book to follow in their footsteps.
THE FLOOD STORY IN MESOPOTAMIA
Psychologically it is not surprising that a flood myth should be deeply embedded in the Mesopotamian psyche, for it derived from and reflected the very landscape in which they found themselves. Their dependence on the Tigris and Euphrates waters was absolute and inescapable, but the awe-inspiring emptiness of the deep sky above them, the suddenness of storm and the tangible powers of the ancient gods like the Sun, the Moon and the god of the Storm meant that even the most sophisticated individuals were never far from the reality of nature’s forces. The flood, an ungoverned power that could sweep civilisation before it like a modern tsunami, was for sure no safe and comfortable bogeyman with which to frighten children but something that enshrined remote memory of a real disaster or disasters. Probably some version of the story had been told for millennia.
Culturally the Flood functioned as a horizon in time, according to which crucial events preceded it or followed it. Great Sages lived ‘before the Deluge’, and all the elements of civilisation were bestowed on mankind thereafter. Very occasionally in cuneiform literature the use of the phrase, ‘Before the Flood’, which acquires the ring of cliché, reminds one ever so slightly of the expression ‘Before the Great War …’
The universal flood was intended as an efficient kind of ‘new broom’ approach that would allow the gods to start recreating more appropriate forms of life afterwards in a clean and empty world. The god Enki (clever, humorous, rebellious) is appalled at the proposal and seemingly alone in anticipating the consequences, so he picks out one suitable human being to rescue human and other life. The Flood Story was thus the very stuff of oral literature. Its central theme affected everybody and all listeners. All men and women knew that, if the gods so wished it, they were doomed; and that stoppage of the very life-giving water of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers would be their undoing if that happened, or if it swelled into a monstrous, all-encompassing water of chaos. The Flood Story is full of fearful drama, human struggle and, at the last minute, Hollywood-like, escape.
Many Mesopotamian stories, in Sumerian or Akkadian, bear indications that they derive from an older time before such compositions were written down. Repetition of key passages, for example, makes a long story easier to remember and promotes familiarity in listeners who might well come to ‘join in’ at certain parts, as small children do when a favourite book is read and re-read. Quite soon after writing had reached the point of recording language in full, at the beginning of the third millennium BC, we see that narrative concerning the gods came to be written down.
Very early clay tablets from southern Iraq contain narrative literature in which the gods feature, although to a large extent these first examples still defy translation. The Flood Story, in contrast, does not seem to have made it ‘into print’ at such an early date. The earliest tablets with any part of the story appear in the second millennium BC, a thousand years or more after the first experiments with writing on clay. We can only imagine how Sumerian and Babylonian storytellers might have spun tales of the Great Flood in the meanwhile, for it must long have been a staple of their craft. By the early second millennium, however, when it does start to appear in written form, we do not have just one Mesopotamian Flood Story, but separate compositions in which the Flood is a central component. This in itself is an indication of the antiquity of the subject, for the power and drama of the flood narrative was unending, preoccupying poets and storytellers as long as the cultures of Mesopotamia endured, if not beyond.
The Mesopotamian Flood Story surfaces in three distinct cuneiform incarnations, one in Sumerian, two in Akkadian. These are the Sumerian Flood Story, and major narrative episodes within the Atrahasis Epic and the Epic of Gilgamesh respectively. Each incarnation has its own flood hero. This means that it is only partly appropriate to speak of a ‘Mesopotamian Flood Story’ as such, for there are important differences between them, although the essence of the story is common to all three. Within these three traditions, different versions of the flood story text were in circulation, some substantially different, where format, number of writing columns or even plot elements could vary as well as language. What we call the Atrahasis Epic was undoubtedly popular, appearing in many formats, never to be fully ‘canonised’, whereas the Epic of Gilgamesh, did eventually become fixed into an agreed literary format. First-millennium Gilgamesh tablets with the Flood Story from the Royal Library at Nineveh are true duplicates of one another that literally tell one and the same story. There are no Atrahasis versions of the Mesopotamian Flood Story so far from the first millennium BC. We need some.
Flood Story tablets distribute themselves over the following broad time periods:
Old Babylonian 1900–1600 BC
Middle Babylonian 1600–1200 BC
Late Assyrian 800–600 BC
Late Babylonian 600–500 BC
Here are the nine known tablets which contribute to our picture of the Mesopotamian story of the Flood and aid us in understanding and appreciating the newly found Ark Tablet.
The Sumerian Flood Story
‘OLD BABYLONIAN SUMERIAN’
The Sumerian account of the Flood is found on a justly famous cuneiform tablet in the University Museum in Philadelphia. Once it had three columns of writing on each side, but approximately two-thirds is missing altogether so our grasp of the whole remains shaky. It was written down in about 1600 BC at the Sumerian city of Nippur, an important religious and cultural centre where many literary tablets have been excavated.
The Sumerian Flood Story tablet from Philadelphia.
(picture acknowledgement 4.1)
Although this story comes to us in the Sumerian language there are features about the wording – such as odd verb forms – that led its translator, Mi
guel Civil, to conclude that the theme of the Flood which destroys mankind probably does not belong within the main body of Sumerian literary traditions. While it does look as if this Sumerian Flood Story account derives from a Babylonian account, its source must have been a version that we have never seen, and it is worth pointing out that separate Sumerian versions of the story, unknown to us, might have been in circulation too.
In this tablet, the great gods, long after the founding of the cities, decide on the destruction of the human race (although we don’t know why), despite the pleas of the creator-goddess, Nintur. It fell to King Ziusudra to build the boat and rescue life, which he did successfully, deservedly becoming immortal:
Then, because King Ziusudra
Had safeguarded the animals and the seed of mankind,
They settled him in a land overseas, in the land of Dilmun,
where the sun rises.
Sumerian Flood Story: 258–60
‘SCHØYEN SUMERIAN’
For a long time the Sumerian Flood Story tablet was unique, but a second fragment has been found in the Schϕyen Collection in Norway. This tells us that King Ziusudra, whom it prefers to call ‘Sudra’, was a gudu-priest of the god Enki. The hero Ziusudra was thus king and priest together, a joint appointment that was probably often the case in early times. The Instructions of Shuruppak, already mentioned in Chapter 3, considered Ziusudra’s father to be a character called Shuruppak, providing a convincing-looking lineage:
Shuruppak, son of Ubar-Tutu
Gave advice to Ziusudra, his son.
The Ark Before Noah Page 9
