The Ark Before Noah

by Irving Finkel

  Atra-hasīs opened his mouth to speak,

  And said to Ea, [his] master,

  “I have never built a boat …

  Draw the design on the ground

  That I may see [the design] and [build] the boat.”

  Ea drew [the design] on the ground.

  Assyrian Smith: 11–16

  Here, in a flash of cross-millennial understanding, we encounter a recognisable human being. Atra-hasīs, going about his daily life and far from thinking about saving the planet, has been charged all of a sudden – by Enki himself – with an impossible responsibility for which he is perhaps Mesopotamia’s least suitable candidate. He has never built a boat, and for him verbal descriptions are not enough: if he is going to have to do this he wants a clear plan. This professed reluctance or lack of skill to undertake an enormous task suddenly thrust upon him has parallels with Moses in the Book of Exodus, who cries ‘Who am I that I should go … ?’ or with the prophet Jeremiah who, taken aback when called by God to be a prophet, initially protests that he is too young and inexperienced to speak in public.

  We now have three cuneiform flood tablets in which the Mesopotamian Ark’s shape is given as (or in one case, likened to) a circle.

  Could a round ark, therefore, be the Mesopotamian norm? Emboldened by this giddy progress – and it must be stressed that such an undertaking was courageous in the extreme – I decided to have another look at Gilgamesh XI: 48–80, which promotes that hugely famous – but very strange – cuboid ark. I say emboldened because this particular passage is one of the most celebrated in cuneiform with a classical status verging on that of Homer. To tamper with the text of Gilgamesh XI is probably to invite arrows and hot pitch.

  Assyriologists have long known that Old Babylonian manuscripts like the Ark Tablet or Old Babylonian Atrahasis lie behind the Assyrian version of the whole Gilgamesh story that we know today from the Nineveh library; Jeffrey Tigay gave an enlightening examination of this matter in 1982. Such ancestor tablets were by then already a millennium or more old. Their texts, as we can see from what survives today, were not always identical; words could change their meanings or become obscure, cuneiform signs tend to get damaged, and the finished literature that the ancient editor-scribes who produced Assurbanipal’s beautiful library manuscripts finally bequeathed us had run through many hands. Deliberate changes and interpolations were also made along the way, and signs of editorial work – sometimes over hasty – are occasionally still perceptible. With the help of the newly arrived Ark Tablet the parallel description of the boat and its building in Gilgamesh XI turns out to be a fertile and revealing case study. We can see that an Old Babylonian account of building a round ark, closely related to that of the Ark Tablet, lies right under the surface in Gilgamesh XI, and we can understand how in the interim its message has become heavily disguised. No one who pored over this story in Assurbanipal’s reading room would ever have guessed that Utnapishti’s gargantuan Ark was also once a giant coracle made of bituminised rope.

  This is a big and bold claim which must be substantiated forthwith. To undertake tilting at this windmill requires another sprinkling of cuneiform philology – which will, I hope, suffice to prove the point.

  Information about the shape of Utnapishti’s Ark as we receive it in Gilgamesh XI is split into two sections; first as instructions from Ea; second in Utnapishti’s account of the construction.

  The instructions from Ea:

  The boat that you are going to build,

  29 Her dimensions should all correspond:

  30 Her breadth and length should be the same.

  Cover her with a roof, like the Apsū.

  Gilgamesh XI: 28–31

  Next come twenty-six lines of quite separate narrative explaining what Utnapishti was to say to the elders and giving ominous warnings as to what he was to look out for, with no ark information. Then Utnapishti records:

  On the fifth day I set in place her (outer) surface:

  58 One “acre” was her area, ten rods each her sides stood high,

  Ten rods each, the edges of her top were equal.

  I set in place her body, I drew up her design.

  I gave her six decks,

  I divided her into seven parts.

  I divided her interior into nine …

  Gilgamesh XI: 57–63

  This is some boat! Square in cross-section, six decks, multiple rooms …

  However, in Gilgamesh XI line 58 the highly significant ark word kippatu, = ‘circle’, is also found. Here, let us beware, it is not spelled in simple signs, but is written with the Sumerian ideogram GÚR. In his great Gilgamesh publication Andrew George took this word as ‘area’ (George 2003, Vol. 1: 707 fn. 5) and translated the first part of the line as ‘one “acre” was her area’. With the benefit of the Ark Tablet we can retain the real meaning and take the word to refer to the Ark’s shape, thus translating kippatu here as ‘circle’.

  Taking this step establishes that Utnapishti’s Ark in the Gilgamesh story was actually circular with a base area of one acre (ikû), exactly like the giant coracle of Atra-hasīs!

  Ark Tablet 9: Let her floor area be one ‘acre’, let her sides be one rod (high).

  Gilgamesh XI 58: One ‘acre’ was her circle, ten rods each her sides stood high …

  In Gilgamesh XI the statement in lines 29–30 that the boat’s dimensions should all correspond and her length and breadth should be the same have become divorced from the crucial issue of her roundness, for this is only referred to further on (and non-explicitly) in line 58. This separation within the text of features that belonged together imposed the unfounded idea of a ‘square’ boat, far from the original meaning. This had the effect of displacing the original circular ground plan idea, enabling the very improbable cube to come into existence.

  Where does this leave us? Another round ark, but this time submerged and almost lost to view. Given that some Old Babylonian text of the same ‘family’ as the Ark Tablet underlies the classical text of Gilgamesh XI: 28–31 and 58–60, we can assume that originally there was one instruction speech by Ea, and that development of the text disrupted the original simple format. This simple ‘proto-Gilgamesh’ instruction speech probably originally read as follows:

  *1 The boat that you are going to build

  *2 Draw up her design;

  *3 Her dimensions should all correspond,

  *4 Let her breadth and length be equal;

  *5 Let one ‘acre’ be her circle, let her sides stand one rod high;

  *6 The edge(s) of her top must be equal.

  *7 Cover her with a roof, like the Apsû!

  The Ark as Coracle

  Enki, looking down, knew all about coracles, and the reasons for his upgraded choice of ark model are, as already indicated, clear and intelligible. Atra-hasīs’s Ark did not have to go anywhere; it just had to float and bob around, settling, when the waters subsided, wherever it had drifted or been carried. The coracle in question was to be traditionally built of coiled rope basketry coated with bitumen; it would be unimaginably huge, but a lot of room was going to be needed.

  Coracles, in their unassuming way, have played a crucial and long-running role in man’s relationship with rivers. They belong, like dugout canoes and rafts, to the most practical stratum of invention: natural resources giving rise to simple solutions that can hardly be improved upon. The reed coracle is effectively a large basket transferred to water, sealed with bitumen to prevent waterlogging, and its construction is somehow natural to riverine communities, so that coracles from India and Iraq, Tibet and Wales, are close cousins, if not easy-to-confuse twins.

  Up until now no one seems to have afforded the ancient Mesopotamian coracle much attention, but with the arrival of the Ark Tablet on the Flood Story scene it suddenly becomes a very interesting creature indeed. There is hardly a mention of the coracle in standard works on ancient Mesopotamian boats, nor even the distinction of a specific word for coracle identified in the Akkadian lang
uage.

  Or is there?

  There is a cuneiform story known as the Legend of Sargon which is of huge significance within the pages of this book, and we will come back to it later in conjunction with the biblical story of Moses in the bulrushes. In the cuneiform version King Sargon of Akkad (2270–2215 BC) explains how his mother had deposited him, a new baby, on the River Euphrates in what is always translated as a ‘basket’, to go wherever the waters might take him:

  I am Sargon, the great king, king of Akkad,

  My mother was a high priestess but I do not know who my father was,

  My uncle lives in the mountains.

  My city is Azupirānu, which lies on the bank of the Euphrates.

  My mother, a high priestess, conceived me, and bore me in secret;

  She placed me in a reed quppu and made its [lit. my] opening watertight with bitumen.

  She abandoned me to the river, from which I could not come up;

  The river swept me along, and brought me to Aqqi, drawer of water.

  Aqqi, drawer of water, lifted me up when he dipped his bucket,

  Aqqi, water drawer, brought me up as his adopted son.

  Aqqi, water drawer, set me to do his orchard work;

  During my orchard work Goddess Ishtar loved me;

  For fifty-four(?) years did I rule as king …

  The Akkadian word quppu in line 6 of this composition has, so far, only three meanings according to modern Assyriological dictionaries: ‘wicker basket’, ‘wooden chest’ and ‘box’. In modern Arabic the word for ‘coracle’ is quffa, which also primarily means ‘basket’, since a coracle is nothing more than a large basket, manufactured like a basket and waterproofed, and this is the local word that has been heard up and down the bank of the Euphrates in Iraq wherever coracles were in use. Akkadian and Arabic are fellow members of the Semitic language family and share many historical words in common. We can say, therefore, that quppu and quffa are cognate words (for ‘p’ in Akkadian comes out as ‘f’ in Arabic), and can see that the two words share the same range of meanings, from basket to coracle. Given this I think we can conclude therefore that Babylonian quppu also had the specific meaning ‘coracle’, most especially with regard to the experience of the baby Sargon.

  We can say more. Sargon’s autobiographical fragment undoubtedly alludes directly to the national Mesopotamian Flood Story, exactly as the story of Moses refers back to Noah’s Ark in the Book of Genesis. The baby was to be one of the greatest kings of Mesopotamia, his life saved at the outset against all odds by a bitumen-sealed, basket-like vessel launched on water into the unknown. The description of sealing the opening with bitumen is a direct textual parallel to the traditional Flood Story account.

  There is an additional dimension to this. In the Gilgamesh account there is a striking poetic image at the end of the great storm on the seventh day:

  The sea grew calm, that had fought like a woman in labour.

  Gilgamesh XI: 131

  It is easy to take this as a simple metaphor, but it would carry deeper meaning for a Mesopotamian. There is a cycle of magical spells to aid a woman in travail which share the image that the unborn child within the amniotic fluid is a boat in a stormy sea, moored in the darkness to the ‘quay of death’ by the umbilical cord and unable to break free to be washed out into the world. The round, nutshell Ark containing the whole seed of life, tossed on the waters before reaching anchorage, is undoubtedly likened to a storm-battered foetus, albeit obliquely; the voyage to eventual safety is re-enacted each time a baby is born.

  According to F. R. Chesney, writing in the late nineteenth century, the smallest Iraqi coracle recorded was ‘3 feet 8 inches in diameter’. The chances are, then, that wee Sargon’s coracle, woven of reeds and waterproofed, was the smallest specimen ever made. If so, we have the unique privilege here of simultaneously documenting at one blow the world’s smallest and largest Iraqi coracles!

  Now that we have the ancient name and two extremes in size we are entitled to look a little further into the question of normal coracles in ancient Mesopotamia. Where in fact are all the others? Since the Ark Tablet uses the general word eleppu for the round craft, it is natural to wonder whether other eleppus in cuneiform texts might not sometimes refer to a coracle, but only the odd example can be quoted as we proceed.

  Although this humble riverine vessel has largely slipped by unnoticed under the radar, I maintain that skin-covered or bitumen-coated coracles must have crossed the Euphrates and Tigris waters, this way and that, more or less since the beginning of time. Pictorial evidence supports this. From the middle of the third millennium BC some of the hard stone cylinder seals that were used to ratify clay documents by rolling over the surface and leaving a customised imprint depict boats in their carved scenes. Most are evidently classic Mesopotamian reed boats with high prow and stern of the school that we have branded (from the Ark point of view) ‘prototype’, but we can distinguish at least one with the characteristic rounded profile, or rather cross-section, of a coracle. This seal is from the Iraqi site of Khafajeh on the Diyala River, seven miles west of Baghdad, and it appears to depict a genuine coracle in about 2500 BC.

  *

  Nearly two thousand years later we see the Assyrian army, nothing if not practical, making excellent use of campaign coracles, and fortunately for us these were depicted in accurate detail by the court sculptors within the daily-life and military scenes of the famous palace wall-sculptures.

  The Assyrian King Shalmaneser III (859–824 BC) left us a graphic account of a military campaign in Mazamua (an Assyrian province on the northwestern slopes of the Zagros Mountains, modern Suleimaniyah), during which he was forced to use ‘reed boats’ and ‘skin-covered boats’ to pursue the enemy:

  They became frightened in the face of the flash of my mighty weapons and my tumultuous onslaught and they swarmed into reed boats on the sea. I went after them in skin-covered coracles (and) waged a mighty battle in the midst of the sea. I defeated them (and) dyed the sea red like red wool with their blood.

  The earliest coracle from the Khafajeh seal.

  (picture acknowledgement 7.4)

  King Sennacherib’s ancient four-man, heavy-duty coracle at work.

  (picture acknowledgement 7.5)

  Ship-to-shore: a heavily laden 20th century coracle approaches the bank.

  (picture acknowledgement 7.6)

  In a sculpture from the palace of King Sennacherib (705–681 BC) at Nineveh (see previous page), two sturdy pairs of Assyrian oarsmen negotiate the fast river currents in a heavy-duty coracle laden with bricks. Their long steering poles end in a curved hook and are apparently weighted at the lower end, perhaps with lead ingots. A fellow Assyrian astride an inflated animal-skin lilo on either side is spearing fish for their lunch. The men are seated on top of the coracle, which is loaded to the full and more, and seems to have some kind of bench running around the top. The oars are secured in a rowlock device. The coracle sides are marked with horizontal and vertical lines, which do not represent the lower layers of bricks inside the vessel but rather some external characteristic of its finish, probably panels of skin stitched together. The top rim or gunwale is clearly shown as a tightly bound and distinct reinforcing element although the binding is not shown at the right-hand edge.

  These sepia snapshots in stone of ancient coracles in use are invaluable to us in demonstrating the existence and practical utility of the vessel in the ninth to eighth centuries BC. No doubt, as was certainly the case later, coracles were made in a range of sizes, from the two-person ‘water-taxi’ to a substantial craft capable of transporting, à la Noah, serious numbers of livestock.

  Further south, a little later, we get hard information on Babylonian coracles in Greek, from the redoubtable Herodotus, writing his Histories in the second half of the fifth century BC when cuneiform writers were very alive and fertile; his book is one of the world’s ultimate bestsellers. An ongoing dispute persists about whether or not Herodotus actuall
y went to Babylon himself, or about how reliable his statements are, and so forth, but when it came to facts about coracles he knew which way was up:

  They have boats plying the river down to Babylon which are completely round and are made of leather. In Armenia, which is upstream from Assyria, they cut branches of willow and make them up into a frame, around the outside of which they stretch watertight skins to act as a hull; they do not broaden the sides of the boat to form a stern or narrow them into a prow, but they make it round, like a shield. Then they line the whole boat with straw and send it off down the river laden with goods. Their cargo is most commonly palm-wood casks filled with wine. The boats are steered by two men, who stand upright and wield a paddle each; one of them pulls the paddle towards his body and the other pushes the paddle away from his body. These boats vary in size from very large downwards; the largest of them can manage cargo weighing five thousand talents. Each boat carries a live donkey – or, in the case of larger boats, several donkeys. At the end of their voyage to Babylon, when they have sold their cargo, they sell off the frame of the boat and all the straw, load up the donkeys with the skins, and drive them back to Armenia. They do this because the current of the river is too strong for boats to sail up it, and that is why they make these boats out of skin rather than wood. Once they have got back to Armenia with their donkeys, they make themselves more boats in the usual way.

  Herodotus, Histories Bk 1

  Tigris coracles in the hands of professionals later caught the fancy of the Romans in the fourth century AD, who, with an eye to stowage and manoeuvrability, brought Tigris barcarii all the way from Arbela on the Tigris to South Shields in Tyneside to build coracles and run their river transports there, perhaps thereby introducing the first coracles to the British Isles. The Latin barca is a small boat carried on a ship and convenient for shipping cargo to shore, a common use of the coracle. Interestingly, an existing Latin term was applied instead of adapting the contemporary local Tigris word, which at that time was surely a form of quppu/guffa.