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| This one may have come up at an inopportune time, considering recent events in Texas and North Carolina. But I figured, there's always a flood somewhere, or will be soon. This flood story is from BBC History: Long before the Bible, an ancient Mesopotamian civilisation predicted one of its most famous stories  A Mesopotamian myth from nearly 4,000 years ago tells of a man who builds a boat to save the world from a divine flood, long before the Bible’s famous story I guess they're weaseling their words so as to not ruffle any feathers (to mix a species metaphor). I have no such qualms, so I'll rewrite the headline to be more accurate. Hell, I'll even keep the British spelling: "Long before the Bible, an ancient Mesopotamian civilisation provided inspiration for one of its most famous myths." Because the Ark thing was clearly stolen from earlier writings, and your religious stories are just as much mythology as the other guy's religious stories. When most people think of a legendary flood of world-ending proportions, their mind will jump to the story of Noah; a man chosen by God to build an ark, gather animals and survive a divine global deluge sent to cleanse the world. I don't know about "most people." Perhaps most English readers who have access to this online article. Long before it appeared in the Hebrew Bible, a remarkably similar tale was written down on clay tablets in ancient Mesopotamia – the home of civilisations that flourished in what is now Iraq, more than 4,000 years ago. Again with the wording. Was Charlie Chaplin's mustache "remarkably similar" to Adolf Hitler's? Chaplin's came first. I suppose "remarkably similar" has the property that the equals sign does in arithmetic: you can switch sides. Still, language may be math, per yesterday's entry, but it's not arithmetic, and that sentence construction seems to imply that the older story might have copied the newer. I will also point out that a flood story makes a whole lot more sense to have its origins in Mesopotamia than in the Levant. The setting for this myth is ancient Mesopotamia, a civilisation whose name literally means “the land between the rivers”. These rivers – the Tigris and Euphrates – run through modern-day Iraq and parts of Syria and gave rise to some of the world’s first urban civilisations, including the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians and Assyrians. Which gave us beer, which is the really important thing. From as early as 3000 BCE, these cultures developed literature, law codes, the first cities, monumental temples, advanced irrigation and vast mythological traditions. And beer. Among these stories is the Atra-Hasis Epic, a myth composed in the Old Babylonian period (c. 1900–1600 BCE), which contains the oldest known account of a divine flood sent to destroy humanity – and a chosen survivor tasked with saving life on Earth. Okay, I don't think I've ever heard it described as the Atra-Hasis Epic. Just goes to show I'm still learning. In the myth, the Mesopotamian gods have created humans but quickly come to regret it, as the unruly people disturb the gods with their chaos and violate the cosmic order. I should write a story about how humans created gods but quickly come to regret it. “The gods decide to send a deluge to wipe out humanity,” explains Al-Rashid, “because they become too loud and annoying, effectively.” Anything to deflect blame from yourself, I suppose. If my neighbors become too loud and annoying, I might say something, or call the appropriate civil authorities, or wish a flood upon them. But I didn't create my neighbors. If I did, I'd acknowledge my own complicity in the disturbance of my peace. But one god, Ea (also known as Enki), disagrees. In secret, he warns a wise king named Atra-Hasis, whose name means “exceeding in wisdom”. Ea instructs him to build a boat, a great vessel that will preserve “the seed of all life on Earth”. It's long occurred to me that, while most of our names tend to be derived from ancient languages, at some point, there weren't ancient languages to draw from, and you get more literal names. The English equivalent would be like when you name someone Patience or Hope. ("Robert," incidentally, comes from Germanic roots meaning something like "bright and famous.") Atra-Hasis persuades his community to help him build an ark. “He’s got everyone in the town to help him build this boat basically in a day,” Al-Rashid says. “And they're having a feast to celebrate.” But the feast is overshadowed by the king’s dread. Atra-Hasis gives a speech filled with puns and wordplay that hint at the catastrophe to come. Sadly, puns almost never translate between languages, so much of the nuance is lost in translation. You get this with the Bible, too. Some verses that make people scratch their heads when read in English (or almost any other modern language) make perfect sense as puns in Ancient Hebrew or Greek. I'm no expert on either language, so I won't provide examples; they're easy enough to find online. Point is, some of our first recorded stories included puns. The first known joke, however, was a fart joke. One of these is the lowest form of humor, and it's not the pun.This Babylonian version of the flood myth wasn’t a one-off, either. Instead, this was a recurring motif in Mesopotamian theology. Yes, because they lived along rivers, and what do rivers do? And this archetypal structure isn’t limited to Mesopotamia. Similar flood stories appear in cultures around the world – from India’s tale of Manu to China’s story of Yu the Great, to Native American myths and Aboriginal oral traditions in Australia. It would be a stretch indeed to claim that all of these flood stories had a common origin. They certainly weren't based on any event that actually affected the entire world. But if you live along a river, and it floods, and you lack knowledge of the size or shape of the planet, it can easily seem that your entire world was destroyed. Why? Well, obviously because the gods were pissed off. There's really no other logical explanation. Certainly not anything involving weather patterns or hydrology, because that shit hadn't been invented yet, but gods had. But, as the article notes, the link between Mesopotamia and the eastern Mediterranean is well-documented. So there's no real mystery as to how one morphed into the other. Because we are, fundamentally, a story-telling species, and we love to copy and modify others' stories. |
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