The Ark Before Noah
Page 26
I threw down their corpses in the mountain, massacred 172 of their fighting men, (and) piled up many troops on the precipices of the mountain. I brought back captives, possessions, oxen, (and) sheep from them (and) burnt their cities. I hung their heads on trees of the mountain (and) and burnt their adolescent boys and girls. I returned to my camp (and) spent the night.
I tarried in this camp. 150 cities belonging to the cities of the Larbusu, Dūr-Lullumu, Bunisu, (and) Bāra – I massacred them, carried off captives from them, (and) razed, destroyed, (and) burnt their cities. I defeated 50 troops of the Bāra in a skirmish in the plain. At that time awe of the radiance of Aššur, my lord, overwhelmed all the kings of the land Zamua (and) they submitted to me. I received horses, silver, (and) gold. I put all the land under one authority (and) imposed upon them (tribute of) horses, silver, gold, barley, straw, (and) corvée.
In fact the literal Assyrian description of Mount Niṣir here is, ‘the mountain presented a cutting edge like the blade of a dagger’, which certainly matches the profile of Pir Omar Gudrun.
So what did those Assyrians think in the ninth century BC as they skirted the great mountain and gazed in awe at the jagged profile that hung remote above them? Had Gilgamesh and the Flood Story not been dinned into their youthful ears? Did not each man, from King Ashurnasirpal down, wonder whether the great boat was still there, and speculate on his chances of making it to the top to see? The king went up at least part of the way, but nothing is said anywhere about any arks.
In principle I find this strange, but perhaps they were all too busy, or maybe there had been Ark expeditions there long before. I do not believe that soldiers had no time for ‘fairytales’ or that the topic was simply never mentioned. If only one of them had written a letter home …
The appearance of Mount Niṣir in Gilgamesh XI exemplifies an important process within Ark history in general, for the Assyrian tradition must surely be a reaction against the much older Babylonian one, rejecting the ‘far beyond Urartu’ idea to reposition the Magic Mountain much nearer home. It is now in a far more convenient mountainous range, the Zagros. In the first millennium BC this area was usually under Assyrian control and thus safe and accessible, but at the same time conveniently ‘other’ to some extent. But the fact is, any Assyrian with a rope and a packet of sandwiches could go Ark-hunting in the secure knowledge that he had the right mountain.
The Assyrians certainly picked a very suitable-looking mountain for the purpose. What is beyond our knowing is when this revised tradition first took root, and, perhaps, what provoked the change. Ashurnasirpal gives both the Assyrian, Niṣir, and the local name, Kinipa, for the mountain in his account, possibly reflecting care to establish that Mount Niṣir was the mountain. In addition – although this is a bit of a long shot – the mention of Mount Niṣir four times in the Gilgamesh XI passage might also be significant. While the repetition might simply be a hangover from a rather heavy-handed oral technique, it seems equally possible on re-reading that it was designed to establish clearly which the mountain in question was – whatever other people might have said – and to use the authority of the classical text to guarantee its identification.
One day an Old Babylonian tablet with the Ark-landing episode will come to light. If that mountain turns out to be called Mount Niṣir, like in Assyria, I will need to buy an edible hat.
Islamic Cudi Dagh
While the story of Nuh and the Flood within Islam is strongly connected with the biblical tradition, there was a divergence in tradition with regard to the mountain.
Then it was said, ‘Earth, swallow up your water, and sky, hold back,’ and the water subsided, the command was fulfilled. The Ark settled on Mount Judi …
Sura 11:44
Cudi Dagh (pronounced Judi Dah) is located in southern Turkey near the Syrian and Iraqi borders at the headwaters of the River Tigris, just east of the present Turkish city of Cizre (Jazirat ibn Umar). It is a good two hundred miles south of Mt Ararat and represents in every way an alternative Ark Mountain.
Certain Islamic authorities fill out the picture of this mountain:
The ark stood on the mount el-Judi. El-Judi is a a mountain in the country Masur, and extends to Jezirah ibn ’Omar which belongs to the territory of el-Mausil. This mountain is eight farasangs from the Tigris. The place where the ship stopped, which is on top of this mountain, is still to be seen.
Al-Mas’udi (869–956)
Al-Mas’udi also says that the Ark began its voyage at Kufa in central Iraq and sailed to Mecca, circling the Kaaba before finally travelling to Mount Judi where it settled.
Ibn Haukal (travelling 943–69)
Joudi is a mountain near Nisibin. It is said that the Ark of Noah (to whom be peace!) rested on the summit of this mountain. At the foot of it there is a village called Themabin; and they say that the companions of Noah descended here from the ark, and built this village.
Ibn al-’Amid or Elmacin (1223–74)
Heraclius departed thence into the region of Themanin (which Noah – may God give him peace! – built after he came forth from the Ark). In order to see the place where the Ark landed, he climbed Mount Judi, which overlooks all the lands thereabout, for it is exceedingly high.
Zakariya al-Qazwini (1203–83)
This last writer records that there was still, at the time of the Abbasids, a temple on Mount Judi which was said to have been constructed by Noah and covered with the planks of the Ark.
Then Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela, who travelled extensively in the Middle East in the twelfth century, recorded this intriguing account:
Thence [from a place on the Khabur river] it is two days to Geziret Ibn Omar, which is surrounded by the river Hiddekel (Tigris), at the foot of the mountains of Ararat. It is a distance of four miles to the place where Noah’s Ark rested, but Omar ben al Khataab took the ark from the two mountains and made it into a mosque for the Mohammedans. Near the Ark is the Synagogue of Ezra to this day.
Adler 1907: 33
Jezirat Ibn Omar is the village at the foot of Cudi Dagh where Rabbi Benjamin undoubtedly saw the mosque for himself. What is especially interesting about this is that the rabbi, who knew as well as anyone the details of the antecedent Jewish tradition and the real meaning of the mountains of Ararat in Genesis 8, is evidently happy to accept the recycled Ark as the genuine item. In describing Cudi Dagh as being ‘at the foot of the mountains of Ararat’ it seems that he is attempting to reconcile the biblical location with this one, confirming this in remarking that the ancient synagogue is still there, ‘near the Ark’, and perhaps by referring to the twin mountains. When his account was written, therefore, it was clearly not only Moslems who believed that this was the resting place. A similar view is propounded by Eutychius, Patriarch of Alexandria in the ninth to tenth century: ‘The Ark rested on the mountains of Ararat, that is Jabal Judi near Mosul’ – unless this means that the name Ararat was at times applied to Cudi Dagh.
The same mountain played the same role in local Christian tradition. Much earlier, there was an early Nestorian monastery on top of Cudi Dagh, as the remarkable Gertrude Bell described in 1911, although where she got the ‘Babylonian’ evidence to which she refers so offhandedly defeats me entirely:
The Babylonians, and after them the Nestorians and the Moslems, held that the Ark of Noah, when the waters subsided, grounded not upon the mountain of Ararat but upon Jûdï Dãgh. To that school of thought I also belong, for I have made the pilgrimage and seen what I have seen … And so we came to Noah’s Ark, which had run aground in a bed of scarlet tulips. There was once a famous Nestorian monastery, the Cloister of the Ark, upon the summit of Mount Jûdï, but it was destroyed by lightning in the year of Christ 766. Upon its ruins, said Kas Mattai, the Moslems had erected a shrine, and this too has fallen; but Christian, Moslem and Jew still visit the mount upon a certain day in the summer and offer their oblations to the prophet Noah. That which they actually see is a number of roofless chambers upon the extreme s
ummit of the hill. They are roughly built of unsquared stones, piled together without mortar, and from wall to wall are laid tree-trunks and boughs, so disposed that they may support a roofing of cloths, which is thrown over them at the time of the annual festival. This is Sefinet Nebi Nuh, ‘the ship of the Prophet Noah’.
The top of Mt. Cudi Dagh, as photographed by Gertrude Bell in 1909.
(picture acknowledgement 12.6)
The enduring, cross-religion importance of Cudi Dagh as the Ark’s landing site encourages me to ask whether its earliest association with the Ark did not precede the arrival of Christianity, but rather goes back to a Mesopotamian tradition.
In 697 BC, four years after his much discussed unsuccessful attempt to capture Jerusalem, Sennacherib, king of Assyria (705–681 BC), was on campaign again. (It would be another hundred years before Nebuchadnezzar’s successful Judaean siege.) This fifth campaign took him northwards, over the border into the land of Urartu, to deal – as Assyrian kings so often had to do – with a conglomeration of local rulers who needed straightening out. They pitched camp, he tells us in his own account of the proceedings, at the foot of Mt Nipur. We know for certain that Nipur was the contemporary Assyrian name for Cudi Dagh because, at the successful conclusion of the campaign, Sennacherib had a whole row of panels with cuneiform inscriptions commemorating this campaign carved into the base of the mountain depicting himself and proclaiming the might of the Assyrian god Assur. They are still there.
On my fifth campaign: The population of the cities Tumurrum, Sharum, Ezama, Kibshu, Halbuda, Qua and Qana, whose dwellings are situated like the nests of eagles, foremost of birds, on the peak of Mount Nipur, a rugged mountain, and who had not bowed down to the yoke – I had my camp pitched at the foot of Mount Nipur.
Sennacherib was not only present on campaign, like King Ashurnasirpal before him, but he was personally and actively involved. He wanted to get all the way to the top of the mountain, to the point that he was prepared to vacate his sedan chair and proceed painfully on foot to get there:
Like a fierce wild bull, with my select bodyguard and my merciless combat troops, I took the lead of them. I proceeded through the gorges of the streams, the outflows of the mountains, (and) rugged slopes in (my) chair. When it was too difficult for (my) chair, I leaped forward on my (own) two feet like a mountain goat. I ascended the highest peaks against them. Where my knees became tired, I sat down upon the mountain rock and drank cold water from a water skin to (quench) my thirst.
There is a fragment of sculpture in the British Museum which actually shows Sennacherib climbing a steep mountain path like this, steadied from behind by a sturdy officer. What was going through Sennacherib’s mind as he climbed Mount Nipur?
Heaving King Sennacherib up the mountain, tactfully, in a fragment of palace sculpture from Nineveh.
(picture acknowledgement 12.7)
It might have been nothing beyond the fervour of a general on campaign, but one cannot help but wonder if there was not more to it than that. If, for example, there was already some local rumour about the Ark and that particular mountain …
Sennacherib had for certain known the Flood Story since boyhood and presumably been brought up with the Assyrian idea that Mount Niṣir was the Ark Mountain. He must have mused more than once over the nature of Utnapishti’s stock of pedigree animals, for we know of his fascination with animals from other countries; as a grown man and powerful king he had a park at Nineveh in which imported natural history specimens could disport themselves freely. More than one writer has pointed out that the number of carved relief panels at Cudi Dagh – eight or nine – was surprising in view of the army’s relatively slight achievement there; conceivably the campaign had a deeper significance for Sennacherib than mere army manoeuvres. Perhaps locals at Cudi Dagh had been promoting the Ark idea for a long time – locals at iconic shrines are notoriously persuasive. If so, all the soldiers in the Nipur camp would have bought an amulet or two of the Real Ark to take home to their wives. We might imagine that Sennacherib might well think the thing worth checking out for himself while they were there.
Of course it can be replied that this is all supposition and that Sennacherib makes no more mention of Ark hunting than does his predecessor Ashurnasirpal at Mount Niṣir. If he found nothing, of course, there would be nothing in the official annals, but there are two slight items of evidence that we can bring before the jury.
EXHIBIT A: A SPOT OF MAGIC
A contemporary Assyrian cuneiform incantation text discloses to us a general awareness that arks were not always to be found on mountains. This spell, which, judging by the handwriting, dates to about 700 BC, is to drive out a succubus, a spectral seductress sent in the night to create a nightmare for the sufferer:
You are conjured away, Succubus, by the Broad Underworld!
By the Seven, by God Ea who engendered you!
I conjure you away by the wise and splendid God
Shamash, lord of All:
Just as a dead man forgot life,
(Just as) the Tall Mountain forgot the Ark,
(Just as) a foreigner’s oven has forgotten its foreigner,
So you, leave me alone, do not appear to me!
The magical power lies in establishing examples of separation that are irreversible: life is forgotten by the dead; the transitory embers of a traveller are cold for ever. There are many Mesopotamian exorcistic spells that rely on this principle, but this allusion to the Ark (eleppu) is unique. To my mind it implies not only familiarity with the Ark-on-the-Mountain idea, but also that there was nothing to be seen of it by then on that mountain, and that, therefore, someone had been looking for it. I submit that the use of this motif in an incantation tablet is the consequence of widespread publicity and discussion and an echo of some unsuccessful royal Assyrian hunting expedition to that end. After all, if Sennacherib had really gone up Mount Nipur looking for the Ark, all his army would have known about it, and on their return everybody in the palace, the capital, the surrounding countryside and, before long, probably the entire empire would have known about it too.
EXHIBIT B: AN ENDURING REPUTATION
Sennacherib’s wicked siege of Jerusalem in 701 BC and the punishment that followed earned him a good deal of posthumous attention in the rabbinical commentaries of the Babylonian Talmud of the early first millennium AD. One of these passages sees Sennacherib back home, in the temple, worshipping a plank from Noah’s Ark:
He then went away and found a plank of Noah’s ark. ‘This,’ said he, ‘must be the great God who saved Noah from the flood. If I go [to battle] and am successful, I will sacrifice my two sons to thee,’ he vowed. But his sons heard this, so they killed him, as it is written, and it came to pass, as he was worshipping in the house of Nisroch, his god, that Adrammelech and Sharezer his sons smote him with the sword …
Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin 96a
These sons, according to the underlying passage 2 Kings 19:36–37, murdered their father Sennacherib and fled to Ararat, and the murder is confirmed from contemporary Assyrian sources. That the reality of his murder should be a focus for stories against Sennacherib is natural, but it is hard to credit that the Ark-plank story could be pure fabrication many hundreds of years later with no kernel of tradition inside it. Again, one wonders if this motif does not echo an Ark-hunting event – this time more successful in that Sennacherib did come home with a bit of wood – that became part of the story tradition around the great Assyrian king. All in all, Sennacherib should have stuck to what his governess taught him.
Cashing In
In comparing the details of the miscellaneous Flood stories it will be remembered that Berossus, the Babylonian priest writing in Babylon in the third century BC, had useful things to tell us. He was certainly a witness to what people were saying about the Ark Mountain in his day, as we know thanks to Polyhistor and Abydenus. For example, Berossus transmitted by Polyhistor:
Also he [Xisuthros] told them they were in
the country of Armenia. They heard this, sacrificed to the gods, and journeyed on foot to Babylon. A part of the boat, which came to rest in the Gordyaean mountains of Armenia, still remains, and some people scrape pitch off the boat and use it as charms.
Polyhistor’s version sounds like an attempt to harmonise two diverse traditions; Armenia to the north – the survival of the Urartu-and-beyond idea – and the Kurdish (Gordyaean) mountains further south, perhaps by then already centred on Mount Cudi.
Berossus as transmitted by Abydenus reads:
However, the boat in Armenia supplied the local inhabitants with wooden amulets as charms.
Considering how little we are otherwise told about the Ark, it is extraordinary how much emphasis is put on the commercial factor. There had obviously been a vigorous local trade in Ark mementoes with amuletic powers since time immemorial. In these remarks, in fact, we encounter an early example of the enduring human hunger for relics, culminating in pieces of the true cross and the finger bones of the holy. One thinks inevitably of booths displaying scraps of wood or pitch lining the roads to the foothills. One of their predecessors could easily have furnished Sennacherib with a heavy-duty plank fit for a king. If this does not illustrate the unchanging nature of human behaviour I know not what does.