In as much as they are decipherable the eight descriptions that accompany the nagûs read as if presented by a very bold traveller returned, passing on his discoveries and explaining as best he could what marvels could be expected by anyone who followed in his footsteps. The tone feels like a digest of heroic journeys and exotic traditions, reduced to a formula. Who might such a traveller be? Some Babylonian proto-Argonaut, sailing fearlessly across horizons in search of adventure and the unknown? A highly intrepid merchant, returning home full of wonderful tales and dining off them ever since? Or, might it not rather be some observer who could fly over the world beyond the ends of the earth? After all, the whole map is a bird’s-eye view, and the original compiler of this account, whoever he was, did have a dad called Bird, as we can see from the last line of the tablet.
Flying over the whole in English translation, nagû by nagû, we can encounter just a glimpse of the miraculous features far below.
Nagû I
Traces of an introductory line in very small writing
[To the first, to which you must travel seven Leagues, …]
… they carry (?) …
… great …
… within it …
Nagû II
[To the second], to which you must travel seven Leagu[es, … …]
…
Nagû III
[To the third], to which you must travel seven Leagu[es, …]
… [where] wingéd [bi]rds cannot fla[p their own wings …]
Nagû IV
[To the fo]urth, to which you must travel seven Lea[gues, …]
[The … ] … are as thick as a parsiktu-vessel; 10 fingers [thick its …]
Nagû V
[To the fift]h, to which you must travel seven Leagues, […].
[The Great Wall,] its height is 840 cubits; […].
[…] …, its trees up to 120 cubits; […].
[… by da]y he cannot see in front of himself […].
[… by night (?)] lying in … […].
[… you] must go another seven [Leagues …].
[… in the s]and (?) you must … […].
[…] … he will … […].
Nagû VI
[To the sixt]h, to which you must travel [seven Leagues, …].
[…] … […]
Nagû VII
[To the sevent]h, to which you must travel [seven Leagues, …].
… […] oxen with horns …];
They can run fast enough to catch wild [animals …].
Nagû VIII
To the [eight]h, to which you must travel seven Leagu[es, …];
[…] … the Very Hairy One comes out of his gate (?).
Summary:
[These are the …] … of the Four Quarters, in every …
[…] … whose mystery no one can understand.
Scribal family:
[…] … written and checked against the original,
[The scribe …], son of Bird, descendant of Ea-bel-ili.
The mountainous nagûs, as far as we can judge from the broken text, are thus each home to remarkable things; the third has (giant?) flightless birds; the fifth the 420-metre-high Great Wall which is labelled on the map itself, with forests of giant 60-metre trees; the sixth (giant?) oxen that can outrun and devour the wild beasts themselves. Unfortunately, due to damage the first, second and sixth nagûs can now tell us almost nothing.
Close-up of Babylonian Map of the World, front view, showing Urartu, the Ocean and Nagû IV, the original home of the Ark.
(picture acknowledgement 12.3)
It is the fourth nagû, however, which houses the greatest discovery. We can now understand, thanks to the Ark Tablet, that it is on that particular mountain, remote beyond the rim of the world, that the round Babylonian ark came to rest. These lines, compellingly, have to be read in the original:
[a-na re]-bi-i na-gu-ú a-šar tal-la-ku 7 KASKAL.GÍ[D …]
[To the fo]urth nagû, to which you must travel seven Leag[ues, …]
[šá GIŠ ku]d-du ik-bi-ru ma-la par-sik-tu4 10 ŠU.S[I …]
[Whose lo]gs (?) are as thick as a parsiktu-vessel; ten fingers [thick its …].
The first broken word in the second line, must, I think, be the uncommon Akkadian noun kuddu, ‘a piece of wood or reed, a log’. This is described as being ‘as thick as a parsiktu-vessel’, the same curious phrase that is applied to the giant coracle ribs in the Ark Tablet: ‘I set in place in thirty ribs, that were one parsiktu-vessel thick, ten nindan long.’ As discussed in Chapter 8, the comparison ‘thick as a parsiktu-vessel’, which expresses thickness in terms of volume, does not occur in other texts, and corresponds to our own ‘thick as two short planks’. The image must have remained permanently tied to Atra-hasīs’s Ark and have always been associated with it, and it here surfaces in the Map of the World in what is, to all intents and purposes, a quotation from the Old Babylonian story.
In the map inscription the equivalent ‘logs’ or ‘woodblocks’ is used, referring to the ‘ribs’. Each of Atra-hasīs’s coracle ribs is ten nindan long, which comes out at sixty metres, and about fifty centimetres thick. Where was Atra-hasīs’s carpenter to procure wood of this size in southern Babylonia? It might well be that the Map of the World answers this question too, for it tells us that trees of exactly the desired sixty-metre length grew in the adjacent Nagû V. Gilgamesh’s punting poles mentioned in Chapter 8 were a mere thirty metres in comparison. It looks as if ‘ten fingers [thick its …]’, takes the place of ‘ten nindan long’, and probably refers to the thickness of the bitumen coating (measured in fingers in Ark Tablet 18–22), with the number ‘bumped up’ as we have seen happen with other Ark numbers, for great lumps of bitumen might well have been scattered over a wide area.
As I understand it, the description of Nagû IV in the Map of the World describes the giant ancient ribs of the Ark. We can imagine Atra-hasīs’s great craft askew on top of that craggy peak, the bitumen peeling, the rope fabric long ago rotted away or eaten, and the arched wooden ribcage stark against the sky like a whitened, scavenged whale. The rare adventurer who makes it to the fourth nagû will see for himself the historic remains of the world’s most important boat.
This, then, is really something new. The oldest map in the world, safe and mute behind its museum wall of glass, tells us now where the Ark landed after the Flood! After 130 years of silence this crumbly, famous, much-discussed lump of clay divulges an item of information that has been sought after for millennia and still is!
But, there is more to be said. If it is established that the fourth nagû is the landing spot, can we identify on the map which of the eight nagûs is in fact number IV? The answer to this is, thankfully, in the affirmative.
The newly adhered nagû with the Great Wall as advertised on television allows us to do what has previously been impossible, namely to relate the eight mountains on the map to the eight descriptions on the back. The Horsley Triangle simply has to be the fifth nagû. How does it work? Observe the following ‘points’:
New readings coaxed out of the fragmentary description of Nagû V mean that this can now be safely identified with the ‘Great Wall’ nagû shown on the map. This is the one at the top pointing more or less north when the tablet is held in the normal reading position, and is the nagû shrouded in darkness.
From this fixture we can deduce that Nagû I is the completely lost nagû which once pointed due south.
We now have to decide whether the sequence I–VIII runs clockwise or anticlockwise in order to locate the other six nagûs correctly.
The triangle annotations in cuneiform were probably inscribed by the scribe on the tablet in an anticlockwise sequence. The legends will naturally have begun with the left nagûs, probably with west, because cuneiform writing runs from left to right, and proceeded triangle by triangle downwards, again because writing proceeds from top to bottom. The tablet will have been slightly rotated in a clockwise direction for each nagû so that the legend could be comfortably insc
ribed below the lower arm of each triangle. This process was followed throughout the eight, since the writing for the northeast nagû is upside-down for the reader.
I read the sequence therefore, anticlockwise, following the order of physical writing. This is not problematical; there are other Babylonian sky diagrams on tablets that run anticlockwise too. Given that, we conclude that Nagû IV, the Home for Lost Arks, is that which still survives on the map to the immediate right of the Great Wall Nagû V. With the help of the map we can now see how to get there.
The ark nagû can be reached most conveniently by travelling straight through the place called Urartu in the northeast of the Mesopotamian heartland – as it is depicted and named (Uraštu, in fact) on the map – and onwards in the same direction, crossing the marratu that encircled the world to the mountain that lay directly beyond at the very end of the world. This was the original conception of what happened to Atra-hasīs’s Ark. It had been carried by the floodwaters beyond the rim of the world, across the enclosing Ocean which must itself at that moment have been overwhelmed by the onrush, coming to rest on the fourth of the eight remote nagûs which were the furthest outposts of human imagination. And, except for heroes, unreachable. And anyone interested had first to get to Urartu.
(picture acknowledgement 12.5)
Biblical Mount Ararat
In a world where quiz shows love to provoke people into giving a knee-jerk answer that is then triumphantly condemned as wrong I suspect that Mount Ararat might often feature. It is a widespread belief that Noah’s Ark came to rest on ‘Mount Ararat’, the defence of the proposition being that it ‘says so in the Bible’. In a way it does, but with one important rider:
At the end of 150 days the waters had abated, and in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, the Ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. And the waters continued to abate until the tenth month; in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains were seen.
Genesis 8:3–5
The Hebrew text speaks of ‘mountains’ in the plural, so the key passage means ‘in the mountains of Ararat’, much as we would say, ‘in the Alps’. We cannot therefore really translate this as if it meant one particular mountain called ‘Mount Ararat’, but this understanding is very ancient and, as it turns out, represents a respectable tradition of its own. (Mt. Ararat is, incidentally, only the modern name. The venerable Armenian name is Massis; the equivalent Turkish name is Agri Dagh.)
The account in Genesis about the fate of the Ark came along, as discussed in the previous chapter, as part and parcel of the whole Flood Story, and there is every reason to assume that this matter too reflects Babylonian tradition. We can now see that, in broad terms, this is in fact the case. Biblical Ararat corresponds to the ancient name Urartu, which was the ancient political and geographical entity due north of the Mesopotamian heartland included in the Map of the World.
Judaeo-Christian tradition, following the Genesis passage, always identified Noah’s mountain with what is now called Mount Ararat, on the basis that it was a ‘huge mountain somewhere to the north’, in the area they knew to be called Ararat. Mount Ararat, located in northeastern Turkey near the borders with Iran and Armenia between the Aras and Murat rivers, is by far the highest mountain in the whole area. The mountain is a dormant volcano with two snowy peaks (the Greater Ararat and the Lesser Ararat). Mt. Ararat is, however, only the modern name. The venerable Armenian name is Massis; the equivalent Turkish name is Agri Dagh. To anyone who knew the story it would be the unmistakable location, easily the first that would have appeared above the waters, with ice-pack resources that could easily accommodate and preserve an ark. Everybody knew that the further north you went the more mountains there were, even if they had never been anywhere near them.
Assyrian Mount Niṣir
The Ark mountain denoted in the mappa mundi was not, however, the only Ark mountain that existed in the Mesopotamian world. An alternative comes with the classical authority of the seventh-century-BC Assyrian Gilgamesh story, the only surviving cuneiform flood account that refers to the manner in which Utnapishti’s Ark came to rest. I translate these lines as follows:
The flood plain was as flat as my roof;
I opened a vent and the sunlight fell on the side of my face;
I squatted down and stayed there, weeping;
Tears pouring down the side of my face.
I scanned the horizon in every direction:
In twelve [var. fourteen] places emerged a nagû.
On Mount Niṣir the boat ran aground.
Mount Niṣir held the boat fast and did not let it move.
One day, a second day, Mount Niṣir held the boat fast and did not let it move.
A third day, a fourth day, Mount Niṣir held the boat fast and did not let it move.
A fifth, a sixth, Mount Niṣir held the boat fast and did not let it move.
When the seventh day arrived …
Gilgamesh XI: 136–47
As the waters receded at least twelve, possibly fourteen nagûs became visible. This is the same specific term that we have encountered in the Map of the World, and here we are informed that they became visible as the floodwaters subsided. One particular nagû, at any rate, was called Mount Niṣir, and it was on this spot that Utnapishti’s Ark came securely to rest. The other eleven (or thirteen) are unnamed. The information here is given in the reverse order to the biblical tradition. Utnapishti sees and counts the mountain tops before his Ark comes to rest on one of them. When the bottom of Noah’s Ark caught fast (October 17th), the tips of no other mountains were yet visible and it took a further three months before the slowly descending waters could reveal them (January 1st).
The Gilgamesh nagû was originally called ‘Mount Nizir’ by George Smith in 1875, and this version of the name, or the form Niṣir, is still the one often encountered in books. The uncertainty as to the correct reading arises because the second cuneiform sign in the writing of the name (with which it is always spelt) can be read both -ṣir and -muš. It was not until 1986 that the alternative reading ‘Nimuš’ was seriously proposed, although I still prefer Mount Niṣir because this is the Mesopotamian name for the mountain and the Babylonian root behind it, naṣāru, ‘to guard, protect’, makes very good sense given the emphasis in this very Gilgamesh passage on how the mountain holds the Ark fast and will not let it move.
Mount Niṣir is an altogether different proposition to the Old Babylonian mountain of the mappa mundi. It was no remote, mythological conceit confined to the world of the poet or the wanderer, for the Assyrians knew exactly where it was, and so do we. Mount Niṣir is part of the Zagros mountain range, located in what is today Iraqi Kurdistan, near Suleimaniyah. An Assyrian exorcistic spell explicitly describes Mount Niṣir as ‘the mountain of Gutium’, the latter an old geographical term for the Zagros range. The mountain is mentioned by name in a very matter of fact manner as a landmark in the military annals of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 BC) recounting a punitive campaign in the ancient kingdom of Zamua, formerly Lullubi. To an Assyrian, in other words, Mount Niṣir was just over the border.
This means that when Utnapishti looked out from his window and saw a dozen or more nagûs, of which Mount Niṣir was one, they were all inside the circle of the known world. The territory on which all those mountains stood to peek above the water lay within familiar, earthly geography. Here, accordingly, we witness at first-hand a drawing-in mechanism whereby the fabled, formerly unreachable icon is wound in like a fish until it is within desired range. The new location deprives the story of almost all of its ‘somewhere far beyond the most distant north’ quality. I cannot help but think that this prosaic attitude to the whole story correlates directly with the image of Utnapishti himself in Gilgamesh XI, careful to load his boat with gold and silver and a group of experts and only those animals that could be rounded up with the minimum of effort. We see here the Old Babylonian narrative diminished on all fro
nts.
Topographical evidence makes it certain that Mount Niṣir is to be identified with Pir Omar Gudrun, as has been shown especially by the scholar Ephraim Speiser, wandering through the terrain himself:
Ashurnasirpal starts from Kalzu early in the fall of 881 and, having passed Babite, directs his troops towards the Niṣir mountain. That mountain, ‘which the Lullu call Kinipa’, is the famous mount of the Deluge Tablet (141) on which the Flood-ship finds a resting place. The identification of Niṣir with Pir Omar Gudrun may be considered as absolutely certain. I have tried to indicate above how impressive the peak appears at close range. But its remarkably-shaped top, especially when snow-capped, also attracts the eye from a great distance. Often visible for more than a hundred miles, it was to the Babylonians the most natural place to perch their ark upon; the hub of the Universe has been placed at times in far less unusual spots.
Here is King Ashurnasirpal’s official ninth-century-BC account, translated out of his cuneiform annals:
On the fifteenth day of the month Tishri I moved on from the city Kalzi (and) entered the pass of the city Babitu. Moving on from the city Babitu I approached Mount Niṣir, which the Lullu call Mount Kiniba. I conquered the city Bunāši, their fortified city which (was ruled by) Muṣaṣina, (and) 30 cities in its environs. The troops were frightened (and) took to a rugged mountain. Ashurnasirpal, the hero, flew after them like a bird (and) piled up their corpses in Mount Niṣir. He slew 326 of their men-at-arms. He deprived him (Muṣaṣina) of his horses. The rest of them the ravines (and) torrents of the mountain swallowed. I conquered seven cities within Mount Niṣir, which they had established as their strongholds. I massacred them, carried off captives, possessions, oxen (and) sheep from them, (and) burnt the cities. I returned to my camp (and) spent the night. Moving on from this camp I marched to the cities in the plain of Mount Niṣir, which no one had ever seen. I conquered the city Larbusa, the fortified city which (was ruled by) Kirteara, (and) eight other cities in its environs. The troops were frightened (and) took to a difficult mountain. The mountain was as jagged as the point of a dagger. The king with his troops climbed up after them.
The Ark Before Noah Page 25
